1. The Fifth Window 05:09
2. I Wonder How Many Miles I’ve Fallen 07:19
3. The Way To Hemingford Grey 05:54
4. Sunlight Cafe 05:57
5. Looking Back At The Amber Lit House 06:47
6. This Place Up Against The Sky 05:46
7. At A Small Hour Of The Night 08:03
8. A Wind Blows Down Turnpike Lane 04:27
9. Ten Mile Bank 05:36
10. The Green-Faced Timekeepers 07:52

When in September 2012 Steve Vai showed up on Guitar World‘s cover along with emerging shredder Tosin Abasi, it seemed like he was trying to bring some fresh air. After the golden era of the ’80s and’ 90s, the electric guitar had – according to few- lost its charm, had less appeal on new generations, despite the explosion of many shredders on YouTube, it was – arguably- less innovative than the past. Yet the Italo-American shaman had no doubts: guitar would have been the instrument of the future. When listening to Mark Wingfield‘s Tales from the Dreaming City it is easy to agree with him that guitar can still disclose planets of the musical system which we did not know about yet. The British guitarist seems not so much interested in what happens in the 21st century, while he is more busy projecting the instrument in the 22nd century. Under the shimmering melodies, the mysterious harmonies, the near-human screams of his guitar, he hides, visible to those who have the curiosity to search for it, a research that is pushing the boundaries of the instrument in a dizzying way towards and beyond the future. Through an use of technology decades ahead in comparison of the rest of the world conjugated with a melodicity that seemed to be forgotten by many guitarists, he creates a music of magic and mystery, bringing us into a David Lynch‘s movie, where he is the director.

Mark Wingfield is at his seventh solo work and two of them have been produced by MoonJune. He has now becoming a front man in the roster of Leonardo Pavkovic‘s label, being a regular collaborator with DwikiDharmawan, MarkusReuter, YaronStavi and AsafSirkis. The last two of them join him again after they did on 2005’s Proof of Light. Adding to those the long-standing collaborations with IanBallamy, JeremyStacey, RenévonGruning, ChristianKuntner. Finally. not to forget the six completely improvised albums together with KevinKastning. Wingfield is divided between the hunt for an alien sound on the guitar and the duties behind the mixer desk, which led him to develop a maniacal attention to detail. It is easy that his signature sound grabs the attention when listening back to his previous outputs, but above all a continuous research in the study of the instrument marks its career. Tales from a Dreaming City is a trio output with YaronStavi on bass and AsafSirkis on drums, as well as the additions by keyobardist DominiqueVantomme. A concept album driving us through melodies and solos. With the words of Wingfield himself: if Proof of Light was a collection of pieces I had written at the time, Tales from the Dreaming City is more a concept album. It is a set of pieces that have a common inspiration, an album of musical stories. For me, these stories are about a moment or an event in someone’s life, or a moment shared by a group of people. An album which pleasantly spans through sober moods à la ECM, hints of fusion-like soundscapes and surprising harmonic progressions, influenced more by contemporary tonal music orchestrations, rather than by jazz trios.

Tales from the Dreaming City start is a 22nd century guitar manifesto. The Fifth Window‘s starting melody climbs on a unpredictably modulating chord progression, before cascading through the diminished scale. Notes give rise to passion and tears through bendings, micro-tunings variations of the pitch -influences borrowed from Indian music, one of his interests- and though an use of the vibrato bar that would turn the heroes of the Floyd Rose bridges era pale. Each note is a world of its own, bringing out the devastation of most inner emotions, hiding the technological machinenery of the filter algorithms that processed it. Touch and effects reach a superior union: ideal union of feeling and machine, without any boundary between the two. A technological research on effects, but even more on basic guitar techniques: most of the unusual tones I get are from the way I play. I use a lot of unusual slurs, attacks, vibrato and pitch bends. I often don’t play any notes in a normal way. And because I’m not using the expected phrasing and I’m concentrating on creating different tones with my fingers, it tends to sound like I’m using a really unusual guitar sound or a lot of effects, whereas in fact I’m not.

Approaching The Fifth Window‘s solo, notes stay suspended in an alternative time-space combination: the initial note is maintained for a such as seven long seconds –Mark uses a sustainer added to his guitar. Then it is varied in pitch through the vibrato bar, which seems to give him the chance to reach any note and any change of chords. Whenever Wingfield seems to be about to go out of tune, we realize that he is always in pitch. Beck, Rypdal and Hendrix come to mind when thinking about guitar’s pitch intonation; but it is the example of wind and ethnic instruments that inspire the English guitarist. Mark Wingfield does not hide the fact that he has long ceased listening to music played by other guitarists, as he is more influenced by trumpet, oboe, voice, or perhaps by ethnic and classical music. A settling of ideas and listenings, which is at the core of his ability to rethink the sound of the instrument starting from the roots. These influences appear back grafted, chopped, fermented in his alien sound.

Machine and heart: he seems to be at the center of the convergence between the technical manipulation of sound and the visionary ability to see harmony and melody together. Long story short, at the intersection of Eivind Aarset and AllanHoldsworth. Tales from the Dreaming City‘s guitar is not just the continuation of what we appreciated in Proof of Light: we go even beyond the humanized, fringed, shouted sound, able to imitate the fluctuations of the trumpet, the treble of the voice or maybe the fluidity of the Indian sarangi. Taking just The Fifth Window‘s closure, it is a 22nd century guitar masterpiece. An ascending, then descending, nervous line, a force of nature doubled by a brilliant loop created live by Wingfield. Two guitars, which seem almost to dialogue with each other, resume part of the melodic lines we listened to in the previous part of the song or alternate past and ahead each other through the use of the delay unit. It climbs on the higher keys, adds the vibrato bar with slides or dry and fierce knocks. The filters seem to explode in a synthetic wah wah, the guitar lines respond each other and fall on a unformed mass of sound chaos. A devastating conclusion that tears at the heart.

Tales from the Dreaming City parts its way from the previous album thanks to the ability to create an even more homogeneous sound. It puts many influences on the table: fusion of styles rather than fusion. Wingfield says: I wouldn’t put it in any specific category. Most of the tracks on Tales From the Dreaming City are based firmly around a central melody and chord progression. To my ears, the melodic approach has something in common with the open lyricism of a lot of ECM jazz and harmonically it’s somewhere between that and classical music. There are elements of rock, and with the classical influences I guess you could say it crosses over into progressive rock. But there’s also a lot of improvisation going on. The ’70s /’ 80s ECM sound and classical music: the modal, dry, mysterious, sober and never overstated sound that made German label’s signature along with lavish orchestrations, with rich and extended chords showing what digital processing is able to by extending beyond the six maximum sounds capacity of the instrument. While listening to This Place Up Against the Sky‘s bridge the memory digs in the sound that distinguished European jazz since the ’70s onwards: the crystal clear cymbal sound by AsafSirkis, the harmonic progression led by MarkWingfield, who makes his way through a series of mysterious modulations placed on the background of Yaron Stavi‘s solo. The Colors of EberhardWeber or the TerjeRypdal of Waves era seem subtly quoted here. The three interact with heavenly pleasure erasing any difference between composed and improvised parts in the magic of the moment.

If Yaron Stavi is a longtime partner with Wingfield, on the other hand AsafSirkis,started working with him on Proof of Light. The three immediately showed a telepathic ability to dialogue with energy and kindness, even in completely unstructured contexts. Taking as example At a Small Hour of the Night, where the trio handles a magmatic and shapeless mass of sound to make it music. A vaguely modal soundscape opened by a guitar that first descends and then rises in a balanced give and take with the bass. Wingfield stops slowly on the tensions and the suspended intervals while Sirkis transforms the tension in a masterful way. In the central part Stavi is relegated to the lower register, everything is slowed down in a suspension of the time and space where Wingfield manages both the soundscape and the minimal leaps of the instrument with incredible ease. Time is suspended. Similarly in the ending of A Wind Blows Down Turnpike Lane, a song carried by a solid groove in mid-tempo, which is usual on most of the songs of the album, and with a recognizable and moving melody. The minute and a half coda of the songs made by Wingfield‘s solo shows shouts excruciating between aggressive slides or slurs, vibratos and the bar that goes up and down holding the listener’s breath.

Mark Wingfield attracts lot of comparisons, but there’s no one that’s good enough. Perhaps it is his ability to tell stories and give form to unusual and distant melodies with great easiness, a storyteller with few notes. Less is more, with this statement the English guitarist praisedJohn Abercrombie and his unrivaled ability to create a world with so little. If Wingifield’s sound seems so far from Abercrombie’s, it is nevertheless very close to the simplicity of the stories he told. Like in Looking Back At The Amber Lit House, a delicate and mysterious ballad, built around a simple yet sophisticated melody. The solo by DominiqueVantomme playing mostly on a continuously repeated note – like he already showed he is able to do on his Vegir– tells with mastery half of the story that Wingfield expands in the next solo. We do not seem to listen the chord changes, as much as a melody is floating, evoking new emotions at every touch. In Tales From the Dreaming City the music is telling a specific musical story which I’ve composed. When we play this music, the point is to interpret it with the intention of telling those musical and emotional stories as best as possible. When it comes to the solos, that’s an opportunity to expand on the story, to improvise something in the moment about the musical story that the composition is telling.

Tales from the Dreaming City is an emotional quest, almost a science of emotions, a journey into the discovery of hidden possibilities: the possible explorations of an instrument that has so much to reveal, the possibilities hidden in simple yet unexpected melodies. If you ask LeonardoPavkovic what he thinks of MarkWingfield, he will answer that he has not reached half of what he can do. Listening to what the guitarist did so far in his career, it seems incredible to think that there is still so much to discover. Yet, if Tales from the Dreaming City is such a quantum leap as it is, we can consider that other worlds are possible and MarkWingfield just begun his travel for the unknown.

Tales from the Dreaming CityMark Wingfield

1. The Fifth Window 05:09
2. I Wonder How Many Miles I’ve Fallen 07:19
3. The Way To Hemingford Grey 05:54
4. Sunlight Cafe 05:57
5. Looking Back At The Amber Lit House 06:47
6. This Place Up Against The Sky 05:46
7. At A Small Hour Of The Night 08:03
8. A Wind Blows Down Turnpike Lane 04:27
9. Ten Mile Bank 05:36
10. The Green-Faced Timekeepers 07:52

The sign is a fracture that only ever opens onto the face of another sign (Roland Barthes)

The music of Nik Bärtsch confines itself to the essential, at the moment when a sign opens and generates the next sign. Each sign contains those that will follow: a melody contains the scale it belongs to and the musicians who played it as well as a word contains the dictionary and all the people who spoke it previously; it contains all the songs that used only a few intervals that are part of it, that used part of the notes or its cadence, the interpretations of that melody, the executions, the words written about it, and finally, turning back to the starting point, the melody itself. In a similar way, each rhythmic modul that constitues the music of the Swiss pianist already contains the exposure of the piece that will come in itself, its development, the hypertrophic generation of its patterns within the execution, through a process led to afloat and placed in front of the listener. Roland Barthes’s quote in the Awase’s booklet, the ECM work that marks the return to the Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin line-up after six years, indicates all that we should know. There is nothing else after the sign, but another sign.

Since nearly twenty years, Nik Bärtsch has been carrying minimalism in a boundary area that he called zen-funk by himself, and that moves at the intersection of repetitiveness and groove, between the freedom of improvisation and the control of the discipline. Through 6 ECM albums and same number of solo or ensembles works, including the 2001 seminal album Ritual Groove Music, he developed a unique use of polyrhythmics. A point of reference for the Swiss scene – alongside the activity as musician, Bärtsch founded his own label, RoninRhythmRecords, even if still releasing his own works under ECM. But also a reference point for an European scene, which is strongly distinguished from American school minimalism. A minimal, postminimal more correctly, vision of the beat, divided between the precision of the angularity and the loosiness and roundness sound of funk. He anticipated the growing interest for polyrhythms shared by many rock and jazz musicians. Something that contributed to the assignment of the award as Rising Star by the magazine DownBeat in 2016. And the American audience has confirmed the interest in the Awase launch tour which took place in the first half of 2018.

This album marks the return to Ronin line-up, which is probably the most famous acoustic / electric outcome of the Swiss pianist. Pairing him since the beginning, even before their 2001 debut, there’s Kaspar Rast on percussions. Sha joined their forces as reeds stable member since the first ECM album. Ending with ThomyJordi, who replaced the Swedish bassist BjornMeyer after his departure in 2011. Previous 2012 Live, which hailed incidentally the arrival of Jordi on some tunes, took a snapshot at Ronin before a leap towards the unknown. Shortly after that, indeed, the other percussionist Andi Pupato, who Bärtsch always recognized as a key element of the band, left the band. The answer at a time of difficulty was to continue working as a quartet and to renew the commitment to research through the constant practice. Since 2004, Nik Bärtsch has been playing regularly on Monday with his bands and since 2009 he has done in the club that he co-founded in Zurich, the EXIL. The line-ups with which he collaborates use these concerts, called ‘montags’ -with progressive number-, as open tests and experimental space on a weekly basis. Crossings of collaborations that may have not yet seen the light in official recordings. And above all, the montags contributed to keep the flame of Ronin alive in these years. I wanted to give Ronin the peace and space it needed to develop, not to put it under pressure, and to take all the steps necessary before the next recording says Bärtsch himself about this recording.

Awase represents a turning point, fed in a new line-up, a new kind of practice with the band – starting from the title itself, borrowed from aikido, which means ‘moving together’. A greater transparency, more interaction, more joy in every performance, coming back again to the words of Bärtsch. The outcome indicates a direction, continuing and bringing beyond the original idea of ​​Ronin. In Awase there is always the ritual, ethnic component that strongly influenced the creation of the pianist’s sound. There is constant repetition through those rhythmic patterns mimicking the biological ones of our body, that are intertwining on several frames and metric levels at the same time imitating the sinuosity of the DNA helixes. Still there is the interaction of the group which is even more and more polished, expanded, amplified. What is changing is the rhythm. Not the surface rhythm, but the deeper level. It is a component at the core of every Ronin work, but now this is crossing a threshold.

The linguist JacquesGeninasca speaks about rhythm: the euphoria that concludes a rhythmic sequence arises under the joint effect of the feeling […] of a surplus of available energy and that of the sudden revelation of a principle of order and intelligibility, more powerful than linear regularities (and their combinatorial variants)1. Rhythm is a load of surplus and order at the same time. The perception of an order, of a repetition of differences, creates a pathemic surplus of feeling in the listener. We enter Modul 60, a piece already performed on Continuum (2016) by Nik Bärtsch’s Mobile. When we did ‘60’ with Mobile, I was hearing it in a very chamber music way and it radiated a sort of bittersweet atmosphere. With Ronin it has a sparseness, an emptiness and a roughness that I really like. In the studio Manfred and I had the idea that it would be nice to play it as a sort of ‘quote’, bringing the story forward from Continuum. Two initial notes by Bärtsch create a static theme and move on a very slow pattern in 5 made by two overlapping rhythms. Sha plays lyric and delicate lines, inserting themselves in the piano playing in the first part and doubling it in the second part as he frequently does, until to the dramatically static coda. But it is above all Kaspar Rast to be the protagonist: few strokes and snare drum they contribute to the energy surplus creation and seem to sound as if we were witnesses of a rite distant, but still very close to the listener. The sense of waiting for something that is about to happen pervades the whole song, similarly as it was also happening in the opening of Holon (2008) with Modul 42. The closure of the piece, truncated in comparison to the 9 minutes of the Continuum version and compared to live where it is often attached to other modules, it is dry and sharp. Listening remains at the maximum point of the dramatic tension without the resolution that the expanded harmonic progression in Continuum may have indicated.

Modul 60 points already at the heart of the problem: rhythm as a device of dramatization at the surface level, as the creation of discontinuity, capable of creating energy surplus. Rhythm that, as Giulia Ceriani says, is the introduction of the discontinuity within the uniform duration, alternation of successive micro-events that present themselves as a recurrence of the simultaneous2. Constant, simultaneous repetition of hypnotic patterns that create a stretching of time. The charge of energy is felt first of all within the body: the feeling conveyed by the device of rhythm is displayed in the urgent need of the body to move at rhythm. –Benveniste defines rhythm as the form of movement. The emergence of a feeling comes from the deep structure of rhythm. As Ceriani says immediately after previous quote, the waiting reveals the pathemical effect which the rhythmic configuration is responsible of. It serves above all to explain the concept, perhaps still unclear, of the autonomous narrativity of the rhythmic group3. Waiting as the creation of very short discontinuities – the rhythm units that move according or discording to the unit even beat structure of the meter – repeated on a regular basis. Waiting as the semiotic creation of a situation of alterity – one semiotic subject waits for the other. And also a trusted relationship between two subjects: the repetitiveness of the rhythm creates a sense of repetition in the listener and at the same time an expectation of what is about to happen, ‘I expect it will happen, I believe it will happen, I trust it will happen’. This modality triggers a trusted waiting – the expectation that what has just happened will occur the same in the next measure. The predictive tension is at the base of the rhythm as a narrative strategy, able to program a configuration of waiting that will be realized on the discursive level. The rhythm transports the waiting from a deep level, where it is an integral part of the rhythmic configuration, to a discursive strategy of the narration at surface level. The rhythm device in Modul 60 is already stripped and reduced to the essential, showing to a surface level the natural mechanisms of the rhythm that act creating tension through waiting. We no longer see only the effect of rhythm as a dialogue between metrics and beats, but the sense of waiting that emerges from the DNA of the rhythm itself. What lies before the score.

The music shows a close affinity to architecturally organized space and is governed by the principles of repetition and reduction as well as by interlocking rhythms. A piece of music can be entered, inhabited like a room (Ecstasy through asceticism, Nik Bärtsch)

A strong vision underlies the music of Nik Bärtsch. Through the principles of reduction and repetition, his tracks are often stripped of melodic content and harmonic progressions. Hypnotic repetition, but also reduction of the available material. Piano is reduced to a percussive instrument, also using the ticks on the strings accompanied by a rhythmic touch, but never sounding mathematically on the beat while playing the keys; the reeds reduced more often to the rhythm, thanks to the continuous breathing techniques by Sha; Rast‘s drums is rarely declined in snare and cymbals, typical of rock or jazz language, instead frequently it is reduced to alternative rhythms, setting itself as a solo-but-not-playing-solos-instrument; and finally the bass by Jordi, which is perhaps the only instrument not reduced, but, as also the case with Meyer, he has a greater possibility of moving seamlessly between rhythmic and solo space, if there was ever any difference between the two in Ronin .

The city produces forms even if it does not have its own form (Ernst Jünger)

Reduction in Ronin is a form of asceticism, of amplification of possibilities through the addition of limits. Bärtsch frequently refers a quote by Stravinsky: When one is able to limit oneself, one gains freedom. The reduction not as a price to pay, but as a condition to gain attention and precision with respect to what is essential. Like an organized vision of space, music addresses to the essential. A space able to multiply its forms. Each of the pieces that the pianist composes has a progressive numeral title; each modul is indicated with a number rather than with a title or with an idea / phrase connected to it: quoting Umberto Eco, the modul is an opera aperta [open work]. And each modul is a ‘part for the whole’: it may be made of a rhythmic cell or two bars or several parts structures, but still extendable and reducible at will. A structure that tends to balance, recalling a quote by Jean Piaget: when the elements of the action do not give rise to simple repetitions, they therefore constitute static set systems defined by certain conditions of balance. The opposite oriented movements in relation to each other and whose alternation, that constituted further steps at the level of the ‘rhythm’, they become simultaneous and represent the components of this balance4. Rhythm has a self-regulating tendency, it tends to balance.

The structure of the modul is not binding the execution, but in fact leaves room for improvisation. Liquid, plastic forms, which can be twisted, manipulated in the context of the band. Modul 58 is a model of this analysis, a small essay on what the form of movement is: when we get inside, we are already beyond the rhythm itself. It’s a point of arrival for all of Ronin‘s music. And it is precisely the ability to manually manipulate the content of the form that makes this form so incredibly expressive. The intro is played around three notes by Bärtsch -a meter in 5 superimposed on one in 7- which is so expressively capable of explaining how to build funk with mathemathics. Bärtsch thinks the reference is to African tribal music: we usually think that metre, rhythm and the start of a piece all begin on the ‘one’, but in a lot of the tribal music styles we admire there is often not such a clear downbeat. ‘58’ becomes a kind of metric mantra which keeps loading itself up until we get to the more open part. The atmospheric playing by Sha, which recalls an easy comparison to Jan Garbarek, and the harmonics on bass by Jordi, they build the load of tension. Kaspar Rast‘s entry is on the high register with cymbals and percussions, counterpointed by the rest of the group on the lower register. In the separation of the spectrum of the four between high and low, the main theme slowly acquires groove, before a chromatic ascent and a pause. At the end the energy is constantly increasing, pushed by the reeds and the bass which now more and more violently mark the notes. The second pause at approximately seven minutes drains the tension out and throws us into the ascent of the second part. Freed from tension, we now look more clearly at the problem of rhythm from within. The slow ascent shows the piano pattern taking the center of the stage: the left hand recalls the prog playing of a Keith Emerson or a Vittorio Nocenzi of Banco del Mutuo Soccorso italian prog-rockers. While Kaspar Rast begins to produce more and more rhythm beats on the snares, Sha and Bärtsch enter with an ecstatic, celestial melody, capable of projecting the listening space into an epiphany. We are around 11 minutes and the feeling is that we are on the top of the mountain to climb. The rhythm is becoming more and more dissected: at this point it is now impossible to understand where the beats are, where the beat is. Yet there is no feeling of polyrhythm anywhere. The direction is clear, it is beyond the rhythm.

The music of Conlon Nancarrow or the études for piano composed by Gyorgy Ligeti -an example is the étude I Désordre– realized an order-in-disorder, or a polyrhythmic configuration made of several frames with the aim of confusing the sense of rhythm at the surface level, although keeping it on a deep one. Here we are witnessing a similar process in a band improvisation context. The rhythm at the surface level becomes a trick, a narrative solution. The multiplication of rhythm levels through multiple overlapping rhythmic groups shifts listener’s attention to the deep structure, bringing it downwards. We are facing a confusion between the background of perception and the foreground object, which creates a short circuit. The real work is on deep configuration, on creating a generative structure. Ligeti said about the études: It is a question of adopting a ‘generative’ kind of compositional thinking, where basic principles function in the manner of genetic codes in the unfolding of ‘vegetal’ musical forms5.

How do we perceive rhythm? Can we explain this phenomenon only as a reflection of biological rhythms – from the heartbeat to the cycles of the seasons – or just as a cultural convention, a sign shared within a community? The deep structure of rhythm can be explained as a conceptual structure, a configuration that is halfway between semiotics and biology. Rhythm is a device of perception that ‘introduces an order’ on the mass of perception and a conceptual configuration that ‘organizes the understanding’ of perceived6. It is located exactly in the border area, indeed becoming one of the keys that allow perception and acting as encoding and organization of the space between our perceptions and how we experience them. This hyper-generative rhythm declination is pushed to the extreme end and brings to light the force that shapes and regulates our perception. At the moment of maximum ecstasy in Modul 58, the listening activity is projected beyond the rhythm itself, going over it.

The following track A is an historical landmark for Ronin, because, in addition to representing the first modul not titled according to the usual logic of the progressive number -but the one of progressive letters?-, it is the first not to bear the signature of Nik Bärtsch, but indeed Sha. The reed player creates a cathartic carpet of two notes that shift with emphasis one from each other, repeated eternally with virtusity of continuous breathing. The chord progression with which the other members of Ronin sustain this display of essentiality recalls an atmosphere delicate and intense at the same time. There is a lot of post-rock writing that Sha carries on from his fellow Sha’s Feckel (no surprise they are produced by Ronin Rhythm Records), especially in the intense final ending when the musician abandons the rhythmic line.

Immediately after Modul 34, revamped from the initial years of the band and never recorded before, Awase comes to an ending with Modul 59. It resumes the direction already taken in Modul 58 taking us to the root of the rhythm as a modeling device of perception. Quoting again the words of Bärtsch: it begins from basic ideas, in this case to do with triplets, and builds until it becomes a sort of polyrhythmic, polyphonic carpet of sound. We’ve rehearsed and developed it extensively, and it still keeps surprising us. The rhythmic maze is first and foremost a key for the musician himself. Generative construction becomes not a cage, but a door that allows to reach the nature of the rhythm device and, therefore, of the perceptual mechanism itself. Beyond it there lies the naked rhythm itself.

Awase is a further step in the travel that Nik Bärtsch has embarked himself into with the Ronin at the root of the rhythm. The outcome has been to reach the essentiality of this phenomenon. And to go beyond it.